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AWS Ground Station

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Re: AWS Ground Station

#141

Post by namibj »

d_silin wrote: post #47
endymi0n wrote: post #22

This was sufficiently close in timing that I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools. Then again, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. Satellite business is hard and capital intensive enough as it is, for starters in the micro-satellite business it would be absolutely prohibitive to run their own hardware just to receive those signals.

I would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000. S-band and beyond will cost you more, but a fully-featured VHF/UHF/S-band one from a proper vendor will be under $100K. X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.

X band reception isn't expensive. LNB + dish is a combination that handles a large part of the X band for And it's normally better to just have more redundancy instead of higher individual uptime, at least as long as space, weight and power are not an issue (i.e., on the ground).

Re: AWS Ground Station

#142

Post by namibj »

tommica wrote: post #135
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth and frequency are very different. They have a 54MHz wide uplink, at whichever of the supported bands you want.

I'm a person who knows nothing about these things, and my quick googling didn't help me - how "fast" is 54MHz wide uplink? Can it be measured in internet network speeds, or in what kind of way can I compare the speed of it?

It depends on the SNR. You can assume that almost all satellite connections use between 0.2 and 3 bit/s/Hz. It's likely closer to 1 bit/s/Hz though.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#143

Post by KaiserPro »

jsolson wrote: post #137
yongjik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)

I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…

its about timing.

Say I have datacentre in london, Sure I could plumb in 4 100gig lines. But they are typically on a year lease and have a long lead time.

Plus, once its on the datatruck its AWS's problem.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#144

Post by mike_d »

jsolson wrote: post #137
yongjik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)

I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…

There is your first mistake: thinking the customer wants to solve the problem in a a good or cost-effective way.

Snowmobile was built because a pre-sales engineer sarcastically said backing up a truck full of hard drives to a customers datacenter would be the fastest way to import X PB of data. It's probably loading from a tape silo and spent 18 months at the customer site.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#145

Post by mbreese »

namibj wrote: post #142
tommica wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a person who knows nothing about these things, and my quick googling didn't help me - how "fast" is 54MHz wide uplink? Can it be measured in internet network speeds, or in what kind of way can I compare the speed of it?

It depends on the SNR. You can assume that almost all satellite connections use between 0.2 and 3 bit/s/Hz. It's likely closer to 1 bit/s/Hz though.

So operating with 54MHz of bandwidth would result in a transfer rate of somewhere on the order of 54 Mbps?

Re: AWS Ground Station

#146

Post by dexcs »

closeparen wrote: post #82
wongarsu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS eliminated all capex expenditures You were always able to just rent servers running in someone else's data center. AWS as we know it launched in 2006, [1] is Hetzner's homepage from 2001 offering dedicated servers for $125/month + $125 setup fee. By 2005 [2] you can get a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB RAM and 350GB traffic for 39€/month. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzne... 2: http…

Hetzner's pricing is a reflection of the generally lower price level in Europe. Dedicated server providers with US datacenters do exist, but their pricing is much closer to Amazon's.

They use consumer hardware, that's why they are so cheap.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#147

Post by smueller1234 »

partiallypro wrote: post #133
yongjik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)

Microsoft has a similar service called Databox, wouldn't be surprised if GCS has something like this as well https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/databox/

GCP Transfer Appliance: https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance

(I work at Google, don't work on that product.)

Re: AWS Ground Station

#148

Post by a012 »

jsolson wrote: post #137
yongjik wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)

I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…

Obligatory XKCD https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Re: AWS Ground Station

#149

Post by moooo99 »

namibj wrote: post #140
closeparen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner's pricing is a reflection of the generally lower price level in Europe. Dedicated server providers with US datacenters do exist, but their pricing is much closer to Amazon's.

Why are they so expensive? German electricity is ~2x as expensive as the cheaper US regions.

A lot of the cheap Hetzner boxes are using consumer hardware. The EX line starting at 40€/month are using 6th generation i7 CPUs. The AX line is using 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs. If you want actual server-grade hardware, you'll end up with around 90€/month, other hosters are more expensive. I'd assume this would explain some of the price difference

Re: AWS Ground Station

#150

Post by navaati »

nexuist wrote: post #136
d_silin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes for cameras. No to 24/7 monitoring for quite a long while - need a really large constellation for that (think Starlink/OneWeb scale).

Understandable - could I instead strategically rent time slots for when the satellite passes over a certain location? That's not 24/7, but once a day for basic data science is certainly enough.

I'm actually a bit sorry to derail the grandparent (totally fine !) sales process :) but if what you want is daily imagery of a specific place for data science purpose, check out Planet Labs, they do just that !
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